High School Students Distribute Communist Leaflet on Ukraine Crisis here ♦ Military Recruiters in US High Schools here ♦ “I Became a Communist in High School. Then I joined the U.S. Army.” here ♦
High School Students Distribute Communist Leaflet on Ukraine Crisis
LOS ANGELES (USA)—Our high school collective read the “ICWP Statement on the Ukrainian War,” and summarized it into a leaflet entitled “What does the Ukraine crisis mean for you? Communist revolution will put an end to deadly wars for profit!”
Students passed out close to one hundred leaflets hand to hand to other students. “One of my teachers got ahold of the leaflet and put it up on his wall,” said Gloria, smiling. “I guess he liked it.” This teacher is now receiving Red Flag.
Sonia said, “I didn’t think other students would be interested in topics like this because usually they only think about sports and video games, but this one kid said he liked it and wanted an extra copy for his mother.”
The leaflet discussed how the war in Ukraine is an imperialist war for profit that affects the US, Europe, and Russia directly and China and the rest of the world indirectly. It is affecting the international working class, soldiers, and students everywhere. This is our opportunity to present the communist alternative to the devastation the profit-hungry bosses are inflicting on our class.
The leaflet called for a communist society where nothing will be produced for profit. Capitalists won’t be able to make money off things that affect all society. Communist society will eliminate wars for profit. In a society without money, the working class will be able to build roads, houses, and hospitals and everything else that meets our needs.
The leaflet concluded that our main struggle is to reach out to students, workers, and soldiers with our communist outlook. The world is entering into a period of more intense wars, fascism, xenophobia, sexism as the bosses brutally attack our working-class brothers and sisters to break our resolve to fight back. We, as well as the future generations, should live in a world free from all of this. We will counter these attacks with communist organizing. We have tremendous confidence in the international working class to end the deadly profit system. We invited readers to join the International Communist Workers’ Party and distribute Red Flag.
The leaflet could have been clearer that the war in Ukraine was provoked by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), mainly led by the U.S. As the French minister of finance declared, “We [NATO] are waging total economic and financial war against Russia, Putin, and his government.” The United States, Canada, and several Western European nations created NATO in 1949 to confront the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which was led by Russia. In other words, the war in Ukraine is a proxy war, a war mainly between two superpowers. In this case, it’s a war between Russia and US/UK/NATO.
The youth in our high school collective are hungry for a system which is more suitable for the entire working class to thrive in. These students are taking the first steps in mobilizing the masses for communism and joining ICWP.
As Latricia put it, “With our distribution of this leaflet as well as Red Flag, students’ interest in taking down the system of capitalism with communist mobilizing has grown. The Red Flag gives students information about how the working class is exploited and how we can get rid of that exploitation.”
These students attend a high school where ICWP has historically mobilized students for the military and communist work elsewhere. Past students have matured and entered education and other fields in the work force. High schools under capitalism are meant to reproduce capitalist relationships with the new coming working class. The managers, supervisors, and CEOs, all the way down to the working poor. Individualism, materialism and business’s bottom line—profits—are the ideologies of today. As we continue organizing in the schools, we hope to continue to win students like these to organize their families, friends, and comrades near and far, as we grow the party to end all wars by mobilizing the masses for communism.
Military Recruiters in US High Schools
I’m amazed, especially in the current period, where some so-called leftists underestimate the need for armed forces to make revolution and to defend the revolution, yet the capitalists have no problem going to high schools and recruiting youth to be part of their armed forces to defend their reactionary regimes. Sounds like most of the fake leftists don’t have a bit of sense of how to make revolutionary struggle and to defend the gains of the revolution.
—Comrade teacher
“I Became a Communist in High School. Then I joined the U.S. Army.”
We’re an international party. What we do can help build the international communist movement on the other side of the world. We saw that truth in action when we read the article from a comrade in India who shared our military pamphlet with soldiers in Kashmir.
We were part of the collective that wrote the pamphlet. It came out of work that we did, where high school students became communists and went into the military to organize. When they got out, we worked together on the pamphlet.
One of us says, “I became a communist in high school. Because of organizing at school and then going to the Central Valley of California to organize with communists in the fields, I was already a soldier with communist ideas when I joined the US Army.
“I found that my fellow soldiers joined the military for a variety of reasons, but none of them said that they were there to protect capitalism. And we found that many of them were open to communist ideas.
“Military recruiters came to our high school. They told us how great the opportunities were in the military, that we’d get training for a good job, and become a stronger person. But they never told us that we would be there to protect the oil, or defend US imperialism, or that it might cost our lives.
“It’s not such a bad thing that the Army goes into these schools. Where the party has to concentrate more is winning young people to communist ideas. Whether they go into the military or not, they’ll be part of the working class.
“We have to tell them the truth about the military: that it protects the profit system around the world. And give young people the tools to go into the military and talk about communist ideas. But you’re organizing in the bosses’ military. They don’t make it easy.
“Soldiers who are ordered to carry out genocidal attacks on fellow workers like US soldiers in Vietnam and Indian soldiers in Kashmir will be even more open to communist ideas. But just imagine if we expose these recruits to communist ideas before they go into the Army—they’ll think very differently.
“So the job of communist organizers in the high schools is critical; if workers learn communist ideas before they go in, it makes all the difference.”
—Comrades in Los Angeles (USA)
Read our pamphlet: “Soldiers, Sailors, Marines: Crucial to a Communist Workers’ Revolution” here